One of my favorite dead-eye sports nuts will leave on an awesome road trip next week.
It’s painful for me, in a jealous way, because it’s my buddy who won the $10,000 trip for two, and we often travel together.
Gary Tinder is one of my dart friends, and we’ve been to Las Vegas, Reno and Chicago, plus we cruised the Caribbean in May.
My husband, Chuck, went to meet Tinder and other friends at the first game of the Seattle Mariners season in the spring. Before he got to the rendezvous bar, Cowgirls Inc., my phone at work jangled.
“Gary won the trip!” my friend, Sean McGee, screamed at a pre-game party. “He sunk the olive!”
Who would have guessed that the 62-year-old sober guy from Bothell would win the trip? His beer of choice is the strictly nonalcoholic kind, which might have given him an edge.
At the KJR-AM opening day pre-game party near Safeco Field, everyone could put their name into a drawing. Ten folks got to participate.
More than 200 were in the contest pool. Tinder said his was around the seventh name drawn.
“I didn’t even know what we were doing,” he said. “I heard if someone won, they got an ultimate Mariner road trip.”
Tinder is up on sports promotions as the owner of GT’s Sports Bar in Shoreline. He regularly goes to Mariner training camp in Arizona, and took in about 30 games this year.
We can guess on Mariner opening day that sponsors didn’t expect a winner to claim the prize in the difficult contest. The 10 entrants had to stand at a launch line on the dance floor and try to toss an olive into a martini glass some 20 feet away. The martini glass was perched on a box about 5 feet in the air.
“We all said it was impossible,” Tinder said. “It was a one-in-a-million deal.”
He observed the first contestants and decided on an underhand toss.
Plop.
The green olive smacked the center of the martini glass and stuck like a spit wad on the ceiling of a third-grade classroom. The place erupted.
“The first contestant’s olive went in the martini glass but popped out,” said Kristine Desrochers, KJR account executive. “Most other tosses were way off. Gary Tinder was the last of the 10 contestants. It was very exciting.”
Tinder said the crowd went wild.
“It was the first time I threw an olive,” he said. “I’ve tried it since and never came close.”
He got to plan details of his trip, which includes first-class airfare to Mariner games in California and Texas, plus hotels, luxury box game tickets, car rentals and $3,000 to spend. He is taking his significant other and business partner, Judy Sankey, whom I am a little ticked at anyway.
As a writer, I think I am a big hotshot at word games. OK, I’ve mentioned that to my friends a time or two, and they find it pretty annoying. Sankey and Tinder came to our July 4 dart group campout, and she challenged me to a match of Upwords, a game like Scrabble.
Not only did she beat me, she trounced me. And now she is going on the dream trip with Tinder.
Really, I’m happy for my friends. I can’t think of anyone who will enjoy watching a Mariner player try to set the record for the most hits in a season more than Tinder.
“Even though the team is down the tube, we could be at the game with Ichiro (Suzuki),” he said. “He has a hell of a shot.”
And he knows about making a hell of a shot.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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